"Sent to bed?" Joan took him up. "Yes, father, I think you had better send me to bed. I know I'm being a very naughty girl, but you won't make me like Mr. Trench, however long you talk."
"You are naughty. You are laying yourself out to annoy me. There is no question of my making you like Mr. Trench, and you know that as well as I do. I am simply asking you to behave with ordinary courtesy to a visitor in my house, who has been seriously hurt in coming to the rescue of my own men—and in the pluckiest way too, and might very well have been killed. Is that too much to expect my own daughter to do, I should like to know, or——?"
"Oh no, father. Of course I shall be polite. I didn't know that was all you wanted."
"Yes, it is all I want. You are taking up a most extraordinary and unwarrantable position. Anyone would think, to hear you talk, that I had come up here to order you to marry young Trench out of hand. You see how outrageous it sounds when you put it plainly."
"Yes, I know it does; but I thought it was what you meant."
"Well, then, it is not what I meant, or anything like it. I'm the last man in the world who would put any pressure on his daughters to marry anybody; and when no word of marriage has been mentioned it seems to me indelicate in the highest degree for a girl as young as you to be turning it over and discussing it in the open way you do. It's what comes of letting you gad about here and there and everywhere, amongst all sorts of people; and I tell you I won't have it."
Joan was enchanted. His leg was over the back of his favourite horse now, and she only had to give it a flick in the flank to set it galloping off with him.
"But, father dear, I haven't been gadding about. It is six months and more since I went to Brummels; and I'm sure I never want to go there again, after all you said about it, and the people I met there."
He reined in. The course was too difficult. "You're in a very tiresome and obstinate mood," he said, "and I don't like it. I come up here to spend a quiet half-hour with you, and you do nothing but set yourself to annoy me. But there's one thing I insist upon; I won't have you making yourself disagreeable to a guest in my house. When young Trench comes downstairs to-morrow, it's our common duty to cheer him up and try to make up to him for all he has gone through on our account. And you have got to do your share of it, and Nancy too, when she comes home. Now do you quite understand that?"
"Oh yes, father," said Joan. "I quite understand that."